Pathfinding and Collision [TW4 Megathread]

Comments

Having played PVP, it's more important that the collision "feels" good. If it looks like I can squeeze though the gap then I should be able to squeeze though. Walling off with raptors feels ridiculous because they are so small and so easily pushed aside.

I'm not saying that all units shouldn't be able to block, I'm saying that my hero should also have weight.

@Wicked said:
When I tried to join other bots in combat it feels really sluggish and laggy. The response is too slow. The best thing about sc2 is that it's snappy and quick, same thing with League. Having responsive controls is really imperative for an RTS game. Even a 100ms-250ms lag time is inexcusable.

Hey there - I took a look at the trace from one of your games, and it looks like you were getting about 30fps. The game is definitely not going to feel great at 30fps - it has a big impact on input latency (e.g. boxing) and round-trip latency (e.g. the lag till units start to move). Can you let me know what kind of hardware you're running on? We still have a lot of optimization work to do, and the game will definitely not feel great for you until we've got it running fast on your hardware.

I ran it at absolute lowest. All settings as low as it could go. The surface's cooling mechanic is "I'm getting too hot so slow down the processing" so I also have a fan on the back of mine. It works pretty well to cool the surface down. Other things to consider: I was playing on a wired Ethernet connection. I didn't have anything else open. I'm running Windows 10.

As someone that's put many hours in SC2 and LoL, I have the same consensus as the majority here: the collision and pathfinding just feels way too clunky. I'm not saying units shouldn't be able to be trapped, but there's just a combination of things that make it all play very awkwardly. Between the larger than visual collision boxes of the smaller units, the rigidity of movement (and once again, units don't necessarily have to be liquid-like such as in SC2 if that's not the gameplay you're going for, but there has to be someway to make it all feel more fluid), and the pathfinding having occasionally difficulties even just moving around your own units, it made me feel as if I was constantly fighting unit movement just to play the game.

I was going to post this as its own thread, but this if everything is kept within these megathreads, then great! All right, here goes.

Friendly Unit Collision:
I'm finding that as unit numbers grow, the micro-management potential for units and Heroes becomes more and more difficult to the point where my army becomes an unwieldy, yet mobile, solid clump. Whether my squad is small or large, my units cut off each other's pathing relentlessly. Some situations where this affects gameplay the most is when I'm taking on camps and my units/heroes are forced into taking those televised, near-lethal hits despite being directed to move away well before they would be hit. This also ties into the ability to efficiently grab orbs from camps and titan towers because units often trip up the Hero on their way to the dropped orbs.

A suggestion for the collision issue would be to implement two systems for friendly (player owned) unit interaction.

The first system, would be a push priority list, where units are given a value that governs their ability to shove aside other units (attacking or not) when directed to move through/around each other. Heroes would have top priority, followed by higher-tech, more expensive units all the way down to the cheap, basic troops. If you want to quickly experiment with this, change some unit's "Push Priority" and "Allied Push Priority" values in the SC2 editor and you'll be able to see this kind of thing in action.

The second system would allow for any units that were selected and given an order to ignore the first system's priority list until they reach their next stop command (or wherever their destination would be). This second system would be in place for situations where higher-priority friendlies are moving into range while crossing paths/colliding with a lower-priority unit that is being saved/microed out. This would ensure that no unfavorable collision would be suffered by the normally lower priority unit who is being microed out. This is a huge deal for the Blue Heroes, as they rely heavily on units that are in constant danger, yet are expected to be durable and ideally survive engagements.

Having these two systems in place would let players cherry-pick any unit they want for an attempted save and also have them move freely to safety under any normal circumstance. This would allow players to save their damaged units if they are diligent, while keeping a basic, underlying push priority system as a fail-safe to ensure that army micro works favorably and sensibly, especially for expensive units which are harder to replace.

TL;DR:
Whether or not this post was useful, it just has to be said: The collision seriously interferes with my enjoyment of controlling any unit, in pretty much every situation I've been in. I hope it's high on the list of things to consider!

The more I think about the current unit collision the more I want it to stay how it is. It's become the norm for me and I feel like it is a core feature; something that makes the game stand out from other RTS. The micro is just different enough due to that extra factor, to create a team RTS experience unlike anything I've had before. Basically, I think the good parts outweigh the bad in this context.

Just some input from a fairly casual SC2/LOL player. Like most of the other posts, I too found that the unit collision/pathfinding was "clunky". I suppose it could add more depth to micro, but coming from the sc2/LOL it will take a good bit of adjusting to.

Around the 45-50 second mark, I start in on an easy camp. I try to attack the eastern-most caterpillar titan with my squad, but the entire time the two Scuttles are just running in place against the western-most caterpillar. Yes, I could've micro'd them around but I was curious if they would ever fix themselves, but alas, they did not. This type of behavior is the root cause of a large percentage of my surprise when units just don't operate the way I feel they should.

(Suggestion)
Hey! I think it would be really cool if the mini-map was able to show were all our units were going when they were sent to a designated area, whether i send them all to one location or split them among different routes, it would help me keep track of where everything was going when.

guys....
I want to say, I love micromanagement of units in this game, but it's hard after playing, like all my life, in deathball. So ppl need time to learn how to get advantage of this things. But its super fun anyway, love it !